Planet London & Planet Edinburgh

Sure, the Economist’s cover story has received heaps of attention these past few days but it’s not the most interesting or even the most important cover story published by a British political magazine last week. Though I would say this, Neil O’Brien’s “Planet London” article for the Spectator is the piece the Scottish National Party should be more interested in.

O’Brien makes a compelling case that London is now, more than ever, a place apart. Its triumph is both magnificent and dangerous. Magnificent because London is, in ways scarcely conceivable forty years ago, a global behemoth; dangerous because of the distorting effect this must have on British politics. In significant ways, O’Brien suggests, London has left the rest of the United Kingdom behind. As he puts it, London exerts an “overwhelming gravitational attraction”.

If the over-cooked housing market in London and the south-east caused problems for the rest of Britain during the Major-era recession those difficulties were trivial compared to those of today when London and the south-east are, relatively speaking, even more powerful.